


The Woman Who Lived - Series Nine - Episode Six (Meta/Review)

by Boji



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Review, Gen, Meta, Reviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 23:20:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5109251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boji/pseuds/Boji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Episode Written by Catherine Tregenna<br/>Images gakked from everywhere. Copyright mainly BBC</p>
<p>Meta: Thoughts on the episode, historical references spotted, nods to other films & other shows (Highlander and BTVS particularly) as well as musings on the Doctor and Ashildr.</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Woman Who Lived - Series Nine - Episode Six (Meta/Review)

**Author's Note:**

> Episode Written by Catherine Tregenna  
> Images gakked from everywhere. Copyright mainly BBC
> 
> Meta: Thoughts on the episode, historical references spotted, nods to other films & other shows (Highlander and BTVS particularly) as well as musings on the Doctor and Ashildr.

  
_The Woman Who Lived_ tells the tale of Ashildr, reborn into immortality (thanks to the magic of advanced alien tech at the end of last episode) Catherine Tregenna giving us a glimpse of the kind of person the Doctor _thinks_ he'd be if he was ever trapped on the slow road, for centuries. _The Girl Who Died_ was saved and damned by the Doctor to become _The Woman Who Lived_ and, in this episode, one of the things Tregenna does brilliantly is to make the man who runs face the consequences of his actions - no matter how unpalatable he finds it.

This is also the companion-lite episode of the series, Clara Oswald being out of the picture for almost its entirety. She wasn't much missed. Maisie Williams and Peter Capaldi were fantastic in creating a rather sparking camaraderie although, in truth, I think it's more to do with Williams' delivery than Capaldi's acting - for once. Williams plays Ashildr as self-possessed, utterly competent and as someone who enjoys adventure and rule breaking. Rather like someone else we know! I also got a sense this was a role Maisie Williams particularly enjoyed playing, and believe that enjoyment shines through in her performance.

  
Travelling to England in the 1650's, the Doctor's tracking the energy signature emanating from alien technology which is both out of time and out of place. Stepping out of the TARDIS we see he's armed with an unwieldy scanner, more reminiscent of a [Bolex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolex) camera than a ray gun. He follows the signal right to the scene of a carriage heist, brilliantly entering the action by climbing into the carriage - together with it's passengers - to clamber out onto centre stage, facing a highwayman holding everyone at pistol point. And so we met Ashildr, eight hundred years from the last time we saw her, riding out in gentleman's garb on a moonlit night. Her face hidden behind a handkerchief, her name lost to time, calling herself the nightmare. Or is that Knightmare?

If she's a highway woman by night, during the day Ashildr's masquerading as a member of the gentry, self-named as Lady _Me_.

_Me, a name I call myself._  
Far, a long a way to run  
(Lyrics from the [Sound of Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brt0KH8q-94))

She's either actually forgotten her birth name or shed it, much like the Doctor shed or hid his. We learn earlier names "died with the people who knew me." Ashildr stands as dark mirror to the Doctor or alter ego, if you will. She has forgotten herself on the slow road. He runs from recollection. But what's most pertinent (and yet easily overlooked) is that for most of the first half of the episode Ashildr is furious with the Doctor. She's livid from the moment she realises he's met up with her again _completely by accident_. Worse, she learns the last time he came across her he walked on by, leaving her in a leper colony she'd founded. That mention dates the sighting to sometime between the [11th and 14th Century](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1050-1485/time-of-leprosy/). Given the fact that eight centuries have passed since the Doctor saved Ashildr, in my opinion he's well deserving of her anger and her disappointment, regardless of any disappointment he may feel at seeing a young woman he admired having grown callous, self-serving and - in his opinion - unfeeling.

Ashildr has trudged through the hell of the middle ages, without belief in a higher power to keep her going (her childhood god Odin having been revealed as a conquering alien warrior) aside from the hope that she'd be rescued by the Doctor. It's extremely plausible she'd be harsh, rather than compassionate. It's also sexist as hell - actually - that she's being judged by the Doctor for being (in many ways) as stereotypically male as her disguise, i.e. successful, ruthless, a tad callous, self-serving and above all a survivor. The era Ashildr is living in is still one where any woman's land and/or wealth would have belonged to her husband upon marriage, where a woman was considered chattel. In fact, it wasn't until 1857 when Criminal Conversation (which enshrined in law that a wife was the property of her husband) had been abolished that a woman might be considered other than a man's property. Fifty odd years after this episode is set, English Lord Chief Justice John Holt stated that a man having sexual relations with another man's wife was _"the highest invasion of property"_ and claimed, in regard to the aggrieved husband, that _"a man cannot receive a higher provocation"_.

Catherine Treganna has written an episode partly inspired by historical events but, primarily, I'd say she was inspired by previous dramatisations of these. _The Wicked Lady_ is a [1945 film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicked_Lady) starring Margaret Lockwood, [remade in 1983](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicked_Lady_\(1983_film) starring Faye Dunnaway. Both film adaptations were based on the novel _The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton_ by Magdalen King-Hall, which was inspired by disputed events surrounding the life of [Lady Katherine Ferrers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Katherine_Ferrers). Lady Ferrars was a Protestant who, like other Royalist supporters at this time in history, was reputed to have turned highway (wo)man to redress her fortune, swindled away by her husband Thomas Fanshawe. But in his _History of Hertfordshire_ (1870–81) J.E. Cussens suggests the term "wicked" is linked with Katherine Ferrers, long after her death, due to confusion with the "Wicked" Lord Ferrers who was in no way related to her, and that she may not in fact have been a highway woman at all.

Leaving the legend of Lady Ferrers aside, there are also nods to [Dick Turpin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Turpin) herein, for Turpin (an English highwayman whose exploits were romanticised) also became a figure of legend after his death. This was primarily due to the inclusion of his name and pseudonym (Palmer) in William Harrison Ainsworth's 1834 novel _Rockwood_ , in which Turpin's historical exploits and character are more than a little fictionalised. Turpin may have lived and died between 1705 and 1735 (he was executed for horse theft) but his fictional self was born in ballads dating from 1737 through to 1845 and stories retold even in the twentieth century. Costumes used in this episode apparently date from wildly differing periods, much like ballads celebrating Turpin.

And then there are the nods to _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and _Highlander the Series_ threading throughout.

It was the diaries which called to mind [Methos](http://highlander.wikia.com/wiki/Methos) for me, this despite the incongruity of the fact that Ashildr's diaries are all similarly bound (highly unlikely) and that she had managed to make her way through the centuries (through lifetimes where she was more impoverished than she is now) with so many keepsakes and reminders of her various lives. Then again, if Methos can have vanished into monasteries why can't Ashildr have hidden in convents over the centuries? Ashildr/Me's study is - of course - akin to the TARDIS control room, which now features bookcases. Her keepsakes remind us of the treasure chest Eleven unearthed from under the TARDIS console, which held clothes and other paraphernalia.

In terms of specific references to _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , aside from quips about Ashildr's height (or lack of, an often made point about Buffy herself) and the Doctor's moratorium on puns when fighting (Buffy's trademark) Ashildr yells angrily at the Doctor that he made and then abandoned her. Here, resonances of Sires and Vampire childer are unmistakable. Like Ashildr, the Doctor is long lived. He too has been _sergeant scientist, inventor and composer_ (see recent bootstrap paradox for the latter, as well as the guitar now slung over his shoulder.) The Doctor is, in fact, far more a father to Ashildr than he is to Clara - no matter the role of father figure he's adopted with his current companion.

_Why haven't you made Clara immortal?_  
_How many have you lost? How many Clara's?_

What's interesting is Ashildr's assumption that the Doctor can make more people immortal; having forgotten that the tech which healed - and damned her - was battle tech from the Mire warriors. It may have been the Doctor's decision to alter its settings and implant it, but he scavenged the technology, it wasn't time lord tech. Ashildr though is under a mistaken impression. She also believes the Doctor's personal history is littered with immortals or long-lived companions he's abandoned without a backwards glance, as he runs away. Obviously, during the past eight hundred years, Ashildr has met up with someone who enlightened her as to the Doctor's history and personality, even if it wasn't made clear to her that most companions were human with an all too short life-span. The most likely culprit is Missy - given the fact that Ashildr tells the Doctor she will become the patron saint of those he abandons - and that she calls herself his friend, just like Missy did. But she could have met Susan, his granddaughter and first travel companion, whom he left behind in the twenty second century. Wikipedia informs me that in tie in adventures Susan Foreman ( who may or may not have married, who may or may not be a mother) found the Master's TARDIS and so could wander in the fourth time dimension once again.

It's also possible Ashildr has met River, who knows full well she was left like a book on a library shelf long ago. Depending on when in her timeline River met Ashildr, she may also know the Doctor eventually asked her ghost (saved in the machine database of said library) to fade. Of course, it's also possible Clara won't die - as Jenna Coleman departs this series - but will instead be accidentally made immortal and then be left on the road to Aberdeen, trapped in the past, far from Victorian London and the [Paternoster Gang](http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Paternoster_Gang). I am, of course, speculating. Contrary to ideas of continuity and fan service - which the mention of Captain Jack Harkness and the discussions on immortality may be - I'd say the topic of the Doctor and his possibly immortal companions has been carefully addressed here due to something _yet_ to happen, rather than something which already has.

In this episode discussions on the nature of the Doctor's friendships, and the burden of immortality (living and loving people who have the life span of a mayfly, whose lives make so little impact on history they are akin to smoke dissipating) are wrapped up in a jewellery heist and the desire of a woman to get out of town on a fast horse. The horse passage on a space ship, promised by one alien as another declines. The victim of the heist? Not the woman who was in possession of the alien broach, robbed by Ashildr!Me and her sidekick the Doctor, but Sam Swift the Quick, the highway man whose forest patch Ashildr first usurped.

Rufus Hound dons the hat and the moustache to play the highwayman Sam Swift the Quick, providing more than a little light relief and gallows humour. While it's likely his stand-up routine will have been popular, I'm in two minds as to how successful the blend of comedy and drama is here. It may be down to taste, but I found Hound's jokey interlude overly long, and unfunny.

Sam, of course, mirrors Ashildr - albeit less successful at his trade (given she has lived for centuries, and so put in more than [100,000 hours to master any skill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\))) his short life about to be extinguished at the end of a hangman's noose, like most of his historical contemporaries. But he's also the personification of Ashildr's redemption. Sacrificial victim at the hands of an alien warrior (like Ashildr before him) he inadvertently becomes her companion on the slow road into the future, from the moment an alien artifact reverses his death in much the same way as its counterpart once reversed hers. The invading army with the lionesque alien scout? The nod to ["Beauty and the Beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast) is all too obvious, although the inversion within the episode is just that this beauty isn't one, due to the nature of her _"rusted heart"_ (if you recall Beauty was meant to be compassionate, and [self-sacrificing](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/beauty.html)) but that both her alien champions (the Doctor and Leandro) can be seen to be beasts. Remember The Great Intelligence did call him "The Beast" in _The Name of the Doctor_.

Ashildr still believes the Doctor's actions (resurrecting her) destroyed her. As the Doctor threatens to keep an eye on her, she so threatens him right back. Her appearing in the background of a selfie taken by a student of Clara's is a rather odd way to prove she's stalking the Doctor, but I was more perplexed as to why Clara's student would consider a selfie a thank you for assistance given on homework. It will be interesting to see what Maisie Williams [next appearance](http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s7/doctor-who/news/a675428/maisie-williams-is-returning-to-doctor-who-in-episode-10-but-shes-not-the-new-companion.html#~psBWbOoGe4IXLm) in the series reveals.

Whilst the acting in this episode was superb, more often than not, I found the writing less so. The mix of comedy and drama was less than successful, the message running through the episode too unsubtle - which is why I truly believe it's serving a purpose later this series. What I truly enjoyed was the camaraderie (and banter) between the Doctor and Ashildr!Me, particularly evidenced in the heist scenes.

Over all this episode wasn't as good as it could have been. The two episodic halves, which make up the story of Ashildr's immortal life, could have been ably condensed into one episode and probably would have been stronger for it.


End file.
